Engage on Facebook, Convert on Adwords - A Homogeneous Mixture

Chemistry has never been my thing but I have always been thrilled by the terms chemists use to describe their experiments and their mixtures.

Recently I came across the term “homogeneous mixture”, which describes any mixture that is uniform in composition throughout. For example, a cup of tea is considered a homogeneous mixture as it doesn’t change when sugar is dissolved into it. Actually, it makes it tastier if you like sugar!

Long story short, in this article we are going to talk about how we can add some Facebook to our Adwords to keep our digital marketing strategy homogeneous and tastier (or more efficient, to use the marketing terminology!).

Why use Facebook for Engagement?

The idea is to move your prospective clients from the top of the buying journey funnel to the bottom by combining the power of the biggest advertising networks available today - Facebook and Google.

The main reason we are going to use Facebook for the engagement part of our strategy is because of its in-depth targeting options. The information people are sharing on Facebook is incredible and that gives marketers the opportunity to create very targeted campaigns.

We can complete our Facebook Engagement strategy in two steps!

Step 1

With huge amounts of data available and detailed audience segmentation, Facebook represents the perfect place to serve an ad to a prospect who is at the ‘awareness stage’. They have expressed some symptoms but haven’t given their problem a name yet.

The first step would be to create a ‘Saved Audience’ based on your buyer’s persona or the market research you have conducted. You would use these to create some ‘Traffic Campaigns’ with educational content that address the symptoms the buyer at the awareness stage has started to express.

Here are some content ideas for your awareness campaigns:

• Where do tea leaves come from?
• What is matcha tea and where does it grow?
• When was green tea discovered?

Step 2

Moving forward with our strategy, we are going to target people at the nest step of their buyer’s journey - the consideration stage. Once again, we will use Facebook Advertising to help us with this challenge.

How can we do that? By creating some retargeting audiences based on the traffic received from the previous campaign.

Now we know that people who visited the content we advertise on Step 1 are likely to be interested in finding a way to solve their problem. So this is the stage in our strategy when we are going to retarget them by offering solutions to their problems.

Some content ideas for Step 2 would be

• Which tea is the best for stomach ache?
• 5 health benefits of matcha tea
• How can green tea help you overcome stress
• A guide on how to choose the perfect tea for you

Our final step will be to target prospects at the decision stage of their buyer’s journey. This is where we are going to combine Facebook with Google. We like to call this either ‘FaceGoo’ or‘GooBook’ depending on our mood. You can use either, we don’t mind!

Why Use Google for Conversions?

As mentioned above, the last step of our strategy, and the most interesting, is to convert people who engaged with our content.

There are a lot of people who are going to identify their problem, educate themselves and find the best approach to their problem but they are not going to buy immediately. Chances are they might even forget where they found the information.

What are the likely to do? They will search on Google at a later stage for a solution at a point when they will be more likely to convert.

This, however, creates a problem. You’ve done all the hard work by creating a ready made solution to our buyer’s problem, but if they start searching on Google they could well end up converting with a competitor.

To stop this happening, in Step 3 we are going to make sure that we are not losing any opportunities to convert our prospects when we have already driven them down the buyer’s journey funnel with our content.

Step 3

If you are advertising on Facebook, I am sure you are already using a Url Tracking tool to track the performance of your campaign through Google Analytics. If you were tracking correctly, you will be able to create some custom audiences very easily.

Here is how to get started:

1. Navigate to your Google Analytic’s Admin Section
2. Expand the Audience Definitions tab
3. Click on Audiences and then New Audiences
4. Navigate to ‘Traffic Sources’ and complete the missing fields (this is how you actually tracked your URL using your tracking tool)
5. Name and save your audience

Google Analytics — Audience Builder

In the example above we’ve created an audience based on the visitors of one of our campaigns. You can follow the steps above to create more than one audience for your Google AdWords campaign.

Step 4

The bottom of the funnel, given the sexy acronym BOFU, is where most marketers struggle with their online strategy. We’ll try to simplify things a little bit, bearing in mind that search continues to dominate conversion activity.

Assuming that prospects who are at the decision stage of their buyer’s journey are likely to search on Google to find a solution to their problem, we are going to create a Search Campaign using Google AdWords.

When building a Google Search campaign, make sure that you have included all the possible keywords that could lead potential consumers to your product and that you have followed Google’s best practices.

Step 5

Last but not least, we are going to select the audience we created as part of Step 3 and use it for the Search Campaign we have created in Step 4.

There are two available targeting options on Google AdWords - ‘Targeting’ and ‘Observations’.

• Targeting - You can use this option when you want your campaign to be targeted only to people who are within your selected audience. In our case, our ads will be visible only to people who visited our website through Facebook Ads.
• Observation - This option will show your ads to people who are within your audience and also people who are using your campaign’s search terms on Google. In this case, you might need to bid a little bit higher to reach your selected audience.

Choosing targeting option can potentially be challenging as you will hear a lot of different opinions from digital marketers on the best way to approach it.

For this specific strategy, I would go with ‘Targeting’ as I would like to test the impact of my content and the general ability to move prospects from the top to the bottom of the buyer’s journey funnel. This is obviously an easier hypothesis to test if I know someone has engaged with my content.

What’s Your Best Strategy?

Let’s quickly sum up what we have explained in this article.

What we are suggesting here is to start you ‘awareness’ and ‘consideration’ stage campaigns using Facebook Ads and then use Google AdWords for your ‘decision’ stage campaigns. To achieve this you will need time, the right URL tracking and to follow best advertising practices for Google and Facebook advertising. If this sounds tricky (we know it can be), please get in touch with us and we can help you out!

Are you using a similar or better strategy? Let us know in the comment below and let us know if you have any questions!